Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:41 pm on 11 February 2020.
On that point, that's exactly why we're changing the regulations. At the moment, the regulations are not clear and actually any landlord can do that for a variety of reasons. We've had quite a lot of consultation responses back saying that actually that's a loophole. So, if you were looking to implement a no-fault eviction outside the thing you could just exclude the tenant for a number of time periods and actually make it very difficult for them to live somewhere. So, what we're doing is we're saying that by regulation we would limit that to certain circumstances—students being a classic example. Actually, there are some tied church properties and other such properties that probably would fall within it, but we're looking to regulate which particular tenancies can have that happen for exactly that reason. It's commonplace for universities to have conferences and so on during the long recess. So, it's to facilitate that, but they're not the only ones. There are other properties that fall into that category. What we don't want is a sort of carte blanche for that to be able to happen. So, that's why we were looking to regulate for that.
In terms of the minimum period for security of tenure, it does give 12 months. It's six at the moment. So, it is a big improvement. It's very hard to legislate for the kind of investment property/not investment property thing that you're talking about, because people would just—[Inaudible.] If I said that if you've got two houses you're not subject to it and if you've got four you are, people would just make three companies. So, there's a whole series of anti-avoidance provisions that you have to look at. So, it's actually really difficult to do that without having a plethora of anti-avoidance provisions crop up.
So, what we've tried to do is to make it simple for people to understand and to make it sure and actually most landlords won't be doing this anymore, because it's not a way to easily get rid of somebody and get somebody in who pays more rent, which is the most fundamental reason that it happens. Deputy Presiding Officer, I personally have quite a big caseload of people who have been evicted through no fault of their own, just because a tenant who can pay better has been found, and this will certainly prevent that.